there is no gentleness in what follows
by thefudge is grumpy
Summary: 1x06 AU. James takes a detour. James/Lorna.


_...the desire_

 _before the desire,_

 _the lick of beginning to know you don't know._

(Anne Carson, Bakkhai)

/

She shook the water from her hair, each curl swollen with rain. The Delaney house was neither asleep nor awake, but in a state of lethargic scrutiny, like a cat in sultry wait. The wooden boards creaked a loud greeting, the rusty hinges groaned a back-handed insult, the frayed wallpaper cast shadows like ropes at her feet.

Everything was trying to snatch her.

"The cholera outbreak's gotten worse," she announced briskly, stepping into the dingy parlor where she found Brace fiddling with the poker in the grate.

The peevish servant did not deign to acknowledge her words. Nothing new there.

"Half of the season's been cancelled," she continued, dropping her soggy headdress on the sofa, where it crumpled mournfully, too sheer for gravity's pull. "It's quite convenient, don't you think? I'm suddenly out of a job for at least a month. What a timely epidemic."

If Brace understood her snide insinuations, he betrayed nothing. His deep-lined face remained mute of expression.

"I heard a noise last night. It sounded like laughter. Has James gone again?" she asked in a voice she hoped was not distressed.

She had not revealed the full range of her fear when he had been gone for those wretched three days, and she was not about to quiver now, but she was _exhausted_ with all these comings and goings. She truly craved a period of rest from the tail-eating snake that was the Delaney household.

"He'll come back."

Lorna looked up. Brace was picking up some old newspapers, rolling them against his chest. The fact that he had bothered to reply was something.

She settled into the chair by the fire and raised her feet to warm them. Rain drops were gliding down her skirts like spider webs. She watched them, eyes lost in a memory. She had been five or six, not much older than that, when her mother had lost her at the meat market. It had started to rain, a biblical downpour which had chased away even the dogs, but little Lorna had stood in the middle of the square where she knew her mother would find her easiest. Her little boots overflowing, her eyes running with tears, she had felt at one with the water and the winds. The despair of those hours had crept into her bones and settled there like a tumor, so that whenever people left now, it felt like a punishment.

When she rose from her reverie, he was standing by the window.

Lorna almost jumped out of her skin.

She hated his largeness and how quiet it was. A man of that bulk should make more sounds.

But she must have been half-asleep because he was being quite audible. In fact, he was panting like a horse.

"Did you run all the way here?" she asked crookedly, by way of greeting.

He was staring out the window with a piercing look, as if he was scouting the rain for enemies. She almost felt like laughing – of course, James Delaney would begrudge the rain - but there was something about the line of his shoulders which did not bode well, a tension that gripped him painfully.

"Has…something happened?" she asked, sitting up.

"You never told me," he said sonorously. "How did you find Mr. Geary?"

Lorna blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"When you went to visit my sister," he reminded her patiently. His patience, however, was like a ticking clock in her ears.

"Oh – he was, well he was _drunk_. At least, he spoke as if he were inebriated. Hardly a pleasant fellow. He didn't seem to like me very much. Of course," Lorna drawled, "he didn't seem to like his wife either. I told you the poor thing was sporting a bruise as large as a fist."

She wondered if perhaps James had gone to punish Zilpha's husband for his indiscretion. If so, Lorna certainly approved of the action. No man should be allowed to lay a hand on his wife. But the law was not very strict when it came to matters of matrimony, which is why Lorna had hesitated to wed, and had only done so when the man in question – Horace Delaney – had been too feeble to even grip her wrist.

"He's dead," James announced matter-of-factly, walking across the room to grab a bottle of gin.

Lorna's mouth fell open, like a fish stranded on the shore. She felt a cold bite in her teeth, as if she'd been punched.

"James – you didn't –"

Oh, _God_ , she had caused that stupid man's death, hadn't she –

"Cholera outbreak," he supplied, uncorking the bottle with a pop. His face had the consistency of a brick, powdered mortar, inorganic matter.

She jumped out of the chair in a fit of anger.

"Cholera outbreak, my hat!" she cursed. "I know there's something disreputable about the whole thing! And I know it involves your blasted gunpowder and the Americans -"

James regarded her insolently. "Sit down. Have a glass."

"Don't tell me to have –"

" _Sit_ ," he rasped, his voice taking on that dangerous quality of a man who could do much more than sprinkle her face with a bruise.

Lorna planted herself with a vicious thud back in the chair and held up a grubby glass for him to pour the discolored gin.

"Now. This is what you need to know. The honourable Thorne Geary died of cholera last night. He was buried at noon today. His wife is now a widow." His sardonic lilt made her blood boil, but she only gripped her glass and stared at the threadbare carpet.

"And I suppose the honourable James Delaney had nothing to do with it."

He nodded absently, watching the dwindling flames in the fireplace with a critical eye.

Lorna heaved a sigh. "He was _not_ a good man, I know that much. But he did not deserve to _die_."

"I agree," he said, crouching down by the fireplace and reaching out with his thumb to push a carbonized piece of wood into the fire.

"Then why - ?" she pressed.

"I did not kill him."

The flames licked at his finger freely.

"Be careful," she chided, "you'll scorch yourself."

He shot her a look over his shoulder. "Have I awakened your maternal instincts?"

Lorna harrumphed, pinching her nose and downing the gin in one fluid motion. It tasted like ashes in her mouth. But she required something strong and nasty for this conversation.

"If you did not kill him, then who did?"

James rose, sticking his thumb in his mouth, sucking on the flesh with relish, as if he was hungry for himself.

"Someone very foolish."

Lorna rolled her eyes, although cold fear ran through her veins. "That hardly narrows it down. Everyone is a fool to you."

He paused, reflecting on her quip. "Not everyone."

"I don't want to know," she decided suddenly. "Whoever it was, you must have whispered in their ear."

" _What_?"

Lorna looked up. James' face had suffered a transformation. His solid features were stretched and thinned with a strange fever. His eyes had taken on a wild sheen.

Lorna pressed her back into the chair, her fingers trembling on the glass. She swallowed down her terror. _This_ was ridiculous. He was not going to intimidate her.

"What did you say?" he asked again, slowly.

"I only meant – oh, don't glare at me like that! It was only a metaphor."

But he still looked like he was in the grip of a chill, as if he had drunk from a very strong wine. He stumbled back, raising a veiny hand to his forehead.

"James, are you all right?"

What happened next terrified her more than anything else. James collapsed on the hard floor.

* * *

He heard her, but her voice did not materialize into sound. It was a beam of light, a lighthouse in the distance, reaching him at the bottom of the sea.

"- stuck taking care of another Delaney, this one possibly madder than his father," she grumbled, pressing another cold compress to his forehead. "Brace has gone to fetch the doctor. I told him it's a bad idea since you'll probably chase him away."

"Don't –" he gasped, trying to raise himself from the bed, but a heavy torpor pushed him back down like the blade of an axe.

"Don't what?" she asked wearily.

" – let the doctor in," he finished.

"Oh, certainly. I'll barricade the door with my body," she muttered, wielding the pitcher of water with some difficulty. "Here, you need to drink something that does not have vapors."

He sensed, despite his weakened state, that she was talking so much to distract herself from the fear that lurked in her breast. She was afraid for him. Foolish little actress.

He let her press the tankard to his lips. She eased a gentle hand behind him to raise his head. He felt her fingers at the back of his neck like the flutter of wings. His needling stepmother, handling him like a babe.

"This is what happens when you don't sleep, don't eat, don't rest, don't even bother to change your clothes," she ranted, her anger rising with each word. "If you _die_ , you take me down with you, you know. The East India Company will have no qualms getting rid of me after that."

He snorted, a sound between a cough and a groan. "You think I haven't made provisions?"

"What does that mean?"

He did not bother to reply. His little thespian could put two and two together.

And she did.

She did not let the doctor inside.

* * *

Lorna knew better than to leave an unsuspecting doctor in the hands of a feverish Delaney. She waited until James was sound asleep before allowing the physician in.

The doctor checked on him rather cursorily, as if afraid to poke the bear. His advice was rather useless; light meals and rest, vinegar rubs and hot nettle tea. James would probably disregard all such measures when he awoke. But that wouldn't be for a while, she conceded. The rain had not let up one bit. She was glad they were both sheltered inside. God knows, he'd be marching around in the slush and the mud, trying to prove to the world that he was invincible. As if the world did not already know.

She settled comfortably in the armchair by her bed. In the chaos and panic of the master's collapse, she and Brace had carried him to the best room in the house, namely hers.

His mother's room, to be perfectly accurate. She tried not to think about that.

It had been a long day, so she too fell in a shallow slumber.

* * *

"I did not – I did not –"

She blinked, disoriented and drunk with sleep.

James was tossing and turning. The covers had been pushed aside. He was struggling to say something, mumbling in his sleep. Lorna stood over him, her own head filled with cotton, her eyes seeing and not seeing him.

"I did not teach her – I did not tell her," he managed at length, his mouth opening wide, a black, glistening gap.

"It's all right, James, it's all right," she whispered, laying a hand on his chest. His skin burned like coals through his thin shirt.

" _Did I_?" he asked hoarsely, eyes still closed. "Did I…?"

Lorna crossed herself once, twice. She did not believe in England's well-mannered God, or anything beyond the stretch of her imagination, but for this one night, she would pray. Pray that his soul found some peace in the midst of these storms.

Perhaps she was also praying for herself.

"Sleep, James," she intoned, pushing back the few hairs on his forehead, wiping away his sweat, "sleep."

* * *

The light of dawn drew weary half-moons under her eyes. She had slept fitfully, like a wild animal in the middle of a hunt. Every muscle in her body screamed with discomfort. The chair felt hard at her back.

She opened her eyes to find that the bed was empty, the house quiet.

Lorna sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.

As expected.

* * *

She came down to the kitchen at noon. Her face was a mask of irritation when what she felt was a deep and overflowing loneliness. She did not know why. It wasn't just on account of James. She wasn't quite that desperate. She supposed that, without her beautiful poetry, without the Shakespearean plays full of longing that filled her days and nights, she was empty, she was no one. She had never been good at serious living. She had never been a doting daughter, a dutiful wife, a respectable woman. But she had never been scandalous and vulgar, either. She had always fallen somewhere in the middle, a pitiful median, a line drawn in the sand.

She did not even notice, at first, the table laden with food.

"Morning," Brace mouthed with an almost welcoming air.

Lorna blinked, confounded. "What's all this?"

"Breakfast. I imagine you'll be needing some sustenance."

She sat down with unsteady legs in the chair he drew up for her.

"Breakfast's been over for hours," she mumbled, grabbing a spoon.

"Aye. Best hurry up then."

She could not account for his cordial strain, but she wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"Has – has James eaten?"

"Aye, I made sure he did."

"He shouldn't be up and about. He should be resting," she said, more to herself.

"So should ye," Brace remarked. "You look like hell."

Lorna turned her lips up in the ghost of a smile. "You must have been a charmer in your day."

* * *

She was stitching the holes in one of her old costumes, the beautiful studded gown she wore whenever she happened to play Hermione in _The Winter's Tale_ or Hippolyta in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. There was a joke running backstage that Lorna Bow had found a dress that could wed winter and summer in one stroke. She was very proud of her garderobe, no matter what people said.

Something childish and perverse suddenly seized her imagination, and she undressed in front of the mirror quickly and slipped the dress over her stays. She missed the stage like one misses fresh air. To step into a place that did not exist, to cover yourself in fantasy, this was the only way to live.

This was how he found her, combing her hair in front of the mirror, garbed in the queenly dress.

Lorna dropped the comb on the dressing table.

"You could knock next time, or better yet, announce yourself."

She allowed herself to look up into his face. There was still the flush of fever in his cheeks, but he looked in possession of his strength, and there seemed to be much of it coiled in his fists.

"Take off that dress."

Lorna drew herself up. "No. If I can't perform, I can at least wear my costume."

James walked towards her with heavy steps.

"Take off that fucking dress."

It took her a moment to realize what he actually meant, to gouge the dark imperative behind his usual stiffness. She seized up, her throat filling up with salt water.

He grabbed her by the waist as you'd pick up a stack of wood and raised her to him, his hand slipping at the back of her neck to tear off the seams, but she gripped his arms and stared at him in supplication. "Please be gentle."

She had never heard her voice sound so brittle and yet so calm.

James paused, his eyes widening with something like restraint. She was pressed up against him, she could even feel his steady heartbeat through his clothes, like a drum beating back into her own breast, two communicating pulses. She wondered if his heart ever quickened.

"Turn around," he instructed with a measured voice.

Lorna obeyed him silently, trying not to tremble.

He unbuttoned her dress with surprising dexterity. He did not rip any of the new stitches.

He let it glide down her legs, pooling at her feet like sea foam. His coarse hands removed her stays and petticoats with the same clinical yet gentle precision. Lorna held a hand to her breasts, eyes closed, spine bent under his touch.

She felt his lips suddenly on her bare shoulder, but he wasn't kissing her, he was whispering something in her skin, "There is no gentleness in what follows."

She shuddered, understanding him perfectly, understanding the vagaries of the flesh, the immediacy of desire. That was what she liked best about her wretched stepson. His every action was honest, his every breath was in line with his beliefs. And she wanted him to cut into her a little, she wanted to feel his cruelty sink into her flesh, let him break her and put her back together. The thought made her want to weep but it also made her turn around in time to catch him as he gripped her thighs and lifted her off the ground. Her body was possessed with a frenzy as she wrapped her ankles around him, her blood pounding in her ears.

She had lain with three men in her lifetime; her first love - a vicar's son, high-strung and blushing, the second - an actor in her troupe who stuck a finger inside her before each performance, and third - Horace Delaney, who had run a few drops of semen down her thigh in a desperate effort to do his duty. Her experience, while not rampant, had given her a clue of men's limited tastes, but there was no accounting for _this_ taste, for this sensation, almost like an _unfeeling,_ a place where meaning and emotion failed.

A succumbing of sorts, but one that gave her power.

There was something deeper than love and lust in this world, and it was this.

He carried her to bed in quick, hungry motions but he did not drop her on the sheets, he did not let her touch the mattress. He kept her tangled up around him like a shadow as he kissed her senseless, prying her mouth open with a ghostly claw rooted in his throat, his thick beard lashing at her skin, whipping it raw. Red trails pocked her skin wherever he traveled. She held onto his neck and back, her fingers turning into vines, capturing him just as he captured her. He tasted briny and thick like mud, he covered her in his scent. She helped him undress in fragmentary, halting motions while he carved a path of teeth down her throat and into the swell of her breasts, almost as if her body did not have slopes and curves, but only openings for him. She shrieked as he latched on to a nipple and suckled perversely, mother and son connected by the act of feeding, but her moans turned the imagined milk into dark licorice which he consumed with relish. She let her head fall back in agony, eyes turned towards the ceiling in abandon, but his hand gripped her chin, sank his thumb into her mouth and pulled her up by the teeth to feast on her tongue.

He seemed to find an evil joy in storming her mouth, that mouth which poured so many words into his ears, as even now she appeared to whisper to him, driving him on. Lorna could not find a way to kiss him back that could equal his fervor, but she gripped his head with her hands and squeezed him there, like a precious thing to be held, and he groaned into her, an animal sound that was soft and foreign. She imagined she was kissing a dragon.

The rough hand on the small of her back still held her above ground - afloat on the edge of a precipice - while his other hand settled in the hollow space between her breasts. He was feeling her heart, not checking for pulse, but tracing its shape. He could rip it out if he wanted to, could part the flesh like Moses the sea, and for a moment, the danger of that possibility hung over them like a powerful elixir.

How would her heart taste? How quickly would he eat it? His mouth watered.

Lorna moaned against him as the toll of death drew nearer.

With half-lidded eyes she saw him now, truly naked, and marveled at the queer tattoos that emblazoned his arms and thighs – she had never seen them this close – but her vision swam before her eyes as his hand moved lower, ghosting over her stomach. He settled in the dampness between her legs where he cruelly parted her lips and let the cool air prickle her sensitive flesh. He began to stroke and tease her nub with the precision of a surgeon. He drew her back and forth around his thumb with practiced, almost lazy movements that were absurdly intimate, as if they had once shared a past where their private parts had not been marked by sin. As if this was innocent.

"James –"

His fingers had slowly wound around her neck and he was squeezing her, pulling her towards him, as his other hand stroked and pinched and teased her cunt.

She cried out in pleasure and pain and sank her nails desperately in his arm, trying to hurt him back, trying to make him feel what she did.

When she came around his fingers, convulsing and twitching like a branch in the storm, he kissed her deep and long and eased the pressure of her throat.

She took her first breath in his mouth and they both shuddered at the sensation. It felt like giving birth.

"You bastard!" she moaned just as he plunged inside her, without preamble. In doing so he finally released her spine, letting her collapse on the bed. The sensation of falling, coupled with his weight upon her, his thrusts fast and frantic and somehow still _patient_ \- all of it was too much for her and she cried out, in grief and love and hatred. He sank his head in the hollow of her neck as he bucked against her, gripping her hips with murderous fingers. She wrapped her fingers in his hair and tugged and pulled and almost wrenched, but her foolish kindness, the drab sentimentality of an actress, prevented her from hurting him too much. He felt her softness, but also her slippery nature, the way her body ran from him and also chased him. She sought him out, rolling her hips against him, and she also fled, catapulting herself into her dreams, her fantasies where this sin was easier to bear. He growled and demanded her attention. She was not going to think of anything else but him. Lorna Bow acquiesced. She pulled his head up and kissed him on the lips and he came against her teeth.

The sounds were like tigers in flight, midnight owls, the screech of long-dead birds. She listened to this symphony in awe.

With his seed still warm inside her, he sank down on his knees in front of the bed and pulled her thighs around his throat. His mouth latched on like a vampire, feasting on her cunt until she screamed that he was a barbarian, although she had to bite on her fingers to quiet her moans. She came a second time with a hand shielding her face, her body arched into his wicked mouth.

They were both panting, his nose still buried in her cunt, her face wet with tears of ecstasy and regret.

* * *

She reflected that, he did not make her bleed, although he could have.

* * *

In the evening that had fallen around them, she touched his now limp cock and marveled at its softness. His face was peace.

She remembered the papers he had burned in the fire, his father's letters. There had been drawings too, drawings of her, which he had fed to the flames. She was grateful to him now.

She stroked his cock without the spark of desire, but with the need to feel he was still tethered to this earth. He hummed into her hair.

* * *

She lay with her head on his chest, both of them splayed sideways on the bed like corpses, crucified for their infidelities.

In a gesture that broke her more than his violent ministrations, he took hold of her wrist and pressed her palm to his lips. He spoke into her hand. "I went up to her room after the funeral."

He did not need to clarify his speech, Lorna understood even before he had spoken.

"She was sitting at her mirror, like you," he continued in the same monotone.

Their eyes were both caressing the same crack in the ceiling. Lorna shivered. He drew her closer against him, wrapping his arm around her breasts, crushing them possessively. If there was a God above, he was not allowed to see her naked.

"It was the first time I saw her as a woman."

Lorna raised a hand to her hair, twisting a curl around her finger.

"What was she before that?"

"My sister," he replied sardonically.

She closed her eyes. "You have been cruel to her."

"Yes. That's what family is for," he said, and let her hand rest against his silent mouth.

Lorna felt the ache of her body after his installation.

She was now family.

What a horror.

He had turned away from Zilpha because she had stopped being family to him, somehow.

He had turned to his step- _mother_ instead, the little fool who had nursed him all night, who had slept at his side, and turned into a crow-woman in his dreams.

Lorna shuddered, visited by a premonition. She saw it plainly in a mirror. She was his new obsession.

And she was tempted to let him run her aground.

James twisted around until he was on top of her again. His knuckles caressed her porcelain cheek. His face was candid. Not loving, nor kind, but in its darkness there was a crack, an opening that called to her.

Lorna parted her lips. "I don't know…if I can be what you want me to be, James."

For the first time since she had known him, James Delaney smiled. His thorny lips turned into a whip, a sting, a deliverance.

"You already are."


End file.
